As the world’s second largest social media channel (surpassed only by YouTube), Facebook offers window tinting shops an opportunity to introduce residents within their local community to 3M™ Window Film solutions.
According to the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of adults in the United States reported using Facebook and 7 out of 10 Facebook users check their account daily. With this kind of traffic, Facebook offers an opportunity for tint shops to draw attention to their products using Facebook ads.
Here are some steps to take to set up advertisements on the world’s second largest social media giant.
Step One: Identify Your Campaign Goal
Understanding the goal of your Facebook ads is the first part of setting up an advertising campaign on this platform. Facebook offers a variety of options to choose from, including awareness, consideration and conversion objectives.
If raising attention to your products and services is your goal, then awareness ads are an ideal objective to choose. There are two types: brand awareness and reach. Brand awareness advertisements are designed to increase knowledge about your brand by showing them to people more likely to pay attention to them. Meanwhile, reach ads put your ads in front of the maximum number of people possible within your budget.
Consideration objectives are designed to create more engagement with your brand. There are several to choose from, including increasing engagement, gaining more app installs (if your company has a mobile application), gaining more video views, getting more leads and spurring more messages.
Conversion objectives are designed to get more action from your audience. In general, conversions are designed to track actions taken on your website or app. Store visits are designed to get more people in your store, and catalog sales is designed to assist with getting more sales from online stores.
Choosing your ad objective is the first step in creating a Facebook Ad. Know your goal when you first start out and it will help guide you through the rest of the steps.
Step Two: Target Your Audience
With so many people in the world engaging on Facebook, this platform provides a unique opportunity to pinpoint your target audience.
Use what you know about your audience – from their age range, geographic community, interests, education and more – to develop a robust target audience for your Facebook ads. Correctly targeting your audience helps to improve the chance that they will want to pick up the phone to call you to ask questions or schedule a consultation.
Facebook offers a robust method to target your audience – including identifying core audiences, creating custom audience profiles and creating lookalike audiences based on your current customers.
Step Three: Decide on Ad Placement Locations
Facebook owns Instagram and Messenger. All three apps are also part of an Audience Network with other partners. Choosing where you want to run your ads is the third step in the process of developing a Facebook ad campaign.
Here are just a few of the placements you can choose for your ads to run: Facebook News Feed, Instagram Feed, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook/Instagram/Messenger Stories, Facebook Video Feeds, Facebook Right Column (for those on their desktop PCs), Instagram Explore and Messenger Inbox. See the full list.
Of course, you also can allow Facebook to decide the best placement of your ads, too.
Step Four: Set Your Budget
With Facebook, you’ll never have to spend more than you want because you are in complete control. Facebook allows you the flexibility of setting your budget based on whether you want a daily limit or a maximum, lifetime limit. You also can set the period of time that you want your ads to run.
Once you’ve set your budget, your ads are submitted into an auction. Here is what Facebook has to say: “The ad auction determines which ads should be shown to which people. Using information you provide in the ads creation process, the auction shows your ad to the people most likely to be interested in it—for the price you bid or less, and never higher.”
In addition to the auction, read more about reach and frequency buying.
Step Five: Choose Your Ad Format
We talked about where you want your ad to display (see Step Three), but what about how you want your ad to display?
The next step to building Facebook Ads for your tint shop is choosing the ad format. You are provided six different options, including: photo, video, Stories, Messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection and playables. Read about the different formats from Facebook.
Tint shops can certainly get creative with their ads. Use a carousel to show off stunning photos of installs, use stories to show the process of an install from start to finish, use a video to show the heat reduction that film provides using a meter – the ideas are endless!
Step Six: Monitor, Adjust and Measure
Once your ads are built, we recommend consistent monitoring. Make any adjustments that are necessary.
Facebook provides a platform, Ads Manager, that allows you to closely see results from your ads. View reach, demographic breakdowns and review the actual cost of ads. Ads Manager even has an app so you can monitor your ads from your mobile phone.
Learn more about Ads Manager and monitoring your ads.
Accent Distributing is “Working For You”
Facebook ads offer a way to reach residential customers and introduce them to what 3M™ Window Film can do in their homes or auto. If you are interested in reaching those in your community to tell them about your services, Facebook is a great option to raise brand awareness.
We also recommend LinkedIn to reach a commercial audience. Read more about LinkedIn on our series of Marketing Corner blogs.
Accent Distributing has been working with 3M in the window film industry for more than 25 years. As a 3M film distributor, Accent Distributing has a network of hundreds of 3M™ Authorized Window Film Dealers throughout the southern United States and Caribbean. Accent Distributing also works with a full-service marketing agency who is available to answer any questions you may have related to your own marketing efforts.
Reach out to Accent Distributing at [email protected] or speak to your sales manager. We are “Working For You.”
